Terminal iMac

The iMac has been out of commission for two months now. The only good thing about losing my job 10 months ago was that my boss let me keep the iMac that I bought for myself as my work computer.

The girls and I took the iMac to the Apple store this morning. The very helpful and knowledgeable genius quickly assessed that it wasn’t a drive or system problem. After another quick test, he gave me the news. “It’s a hardware problem. Your USB ports are bad.” Cool. I thought I could just get those swapped out. Then he followed with, “You’ll have to replace the logic board.”

$500 for the logic board and $150 for labor. $650 would get me an iPhone. So I opted to not get the iMac a new logic board. The helpful genius showed me how to start the iMac so it will act as an external drive and allow me to recover all of our photos, documents, movies, music, etc. I was happy that I was able to do that. Here’s instructions on how to use FireWire target disk mode in case you find yourself in a situation similar to mine.

Thankfully it was a “free” computer (it only cost me my job) so I’m not out any money. I’m in the process of transferring 60 GB of photos to the LaCie portable drive.

When I told Elise what the genius told me, she said, “I thought they were supposed to ‘just work'”. I then had to explain how hardware often fails and that it wasn’t really a “Mac” issue, just bad components. Nonetheless she was still keen on the idea of selling the iMac for parts and her HP laptop so we can get her a MacBook.

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